Graffiti InternationalI initially became interested in graffiti as a lexical phenomenon. Perhaps my curiosity was first piqued by graffiti that seemed to promise sexual adventure. As a teenager, I found men’s bathrooms and telephone booths covered with such notices as “for the best [x] around, call [number].” If you called those numbers, how often would you find what the graffiti promised? I’d heard stories of such numbers leading to the fuck or blow job or other “x” advertised, but didn’t know whether or not to believe these stories. It seemed likely that they were pranks or slurs. In that spirit, I put up a graffito in the men’s room at the North Shore railroad station advertising the phone number of a teacher whom I despised - leaving me to imagine the phone calls she might receive. For all I know, the other graffiti on the wall may have been no more than a list of the phone numbers of pompous educators, bureaucrats, and clergy, becoming something like an inverted who’s who directory of prominent citizens. Later, I noticed link or chain graffiti, in which people responded to previous statements. I encountered such a string which began with a racist statement followed by a retort. Over a period of a month or so, I watched the harangues continue to grow, oddly paralleling the exchange of rhymed insults practiced by some people of African descent. It seemed that the white supremacist who wrote the initial remark didn’t know he was setting up a form of exchange that was part of the culture he wanted to bash. I never saw any of the writers who contributed to this exchange. It’s altogether possible that the first remark had been written by an African American, and that some of the remarks added from the black side may have been written by white people. With graffiti of this sort, you never know who writes what. I incorporated parts of this exchange into a short story. Chancing upon magazine articles on graffiti showed me that I wasn’t alone in the observation of this phenomenon. I also noticed that two writers referred to the same exchange. Here’s how it went - Writer A: “My mother made me a homosexual.” Writer B: “If I gave her enough yarn, do you think she might make me one too?” Graffiti had made its way into the supposedly superior mode of work published in print. I also found that archaeologists used (or tried to use) graffiti in their studies. The enigmatic nature of this comes through clearly enough in a graffito from Pompeii: “Liars and thieves vote for Marcus Gracus.” [I’m not sure if Marcus Gracus was the name used, but continue the tradition by filling one in.] This could be a slur on the candidate, implying that only liars and thieves would voted for him. But there’s no reason to feel secure in that reading. “Liars and Thieves” could have been a fraternal organization, such as The Odd Fellows or The Knights of Columbus, and the graffito may have been a plain endorsement containing no satire. The Paris Spring of 1968 extended the significance and the conundrums of graffiti. The first came in the form of recorded “graffiti” among the rebels. These included such classics as “All power to the imagination” and “Be a realist: demand the impossible.” As the situation came into focus, it became clear that some of these aphorisms did not constitute graffiti in the traditional sense. Some were written on posters as carefully planed slogans. Some were not simply scrawled but written in Lettrist style. As part of the art movement in the second half of the 20th Century that came closest to actually effecting social change, including the integration of popular and reserved art, these pieces seemed perfect in both the political and artistic realms. The fact that these spheres couldn’t be segregated, and that integration of art into daily life was part of the dynamic and the goal of Lettrism and its cognate, Situationism, the inability to sort out graffiti from other art forms seemed to have reached its epitome. In the 1960s and 70s, most of the graffiti I saw that went beyond doodles seemed more oriented to verbal message, usually with heavy political slogans and retorts, essentially a form of public protest. But as the 1970s rolled on, I began to see graffiti that relied on genres of painting appear more and more frequently. From the start, many seemed crude and pointless, but some seemed extremely well done. The writing of short phrases or names took on some of the qualities of painting. At the same time, particularly in Chicano neighborhoods, some took on the character of murals, and by the end of the decade, some of these had become welcome by communities and even supported by local administrations. In the 80s, the works that the graffiti artists themselves called “paintings” as well as those they called “writing” expanded rapidly, and everybody from the police to sociologists to art critics had something to say about it. Controversies themselves helped establish the presence of graffiti as a form of public art. I wrote my first essays on the subject, but didn’t have any means available to reproduce examples in other venues. As an outsider rather than one of the artists, I contented myself with observation. To me, the art had become a form or a cognate of visual poetry as well as other types of art. I found it interesting that its rise and spread coincided with the growth of mail art. Both approaches sought to make work available that would otherwise go unseen, and the spread of both encouraged practitioners to strive for something more. At the same time, both undermined notions of art as elitist zones of exclusion, and both celebrated ephemerallity. After I had made my initial entries for forms of visual poetry on the Web, it seemed only natural to include graffiti art in my anthology, and it occurred to me that the site could act as a meeting place for visual poetry and graffiti practitioners. I had watched the way that calligraphers and visual poets had followed similar courses without paying any attention to each other, and the lack of communication seemed one of the many misfortunes of the second half of the century, particularly since the walls of snobbery and ignorance the two groups built up between them were being undermined elsewhere in society by graffiti and mail art. I hoped that Amy Franceschini would join in the graffiti project since she had done extensive mulit-media documentation of the art as practiced in San Francisco. By this time, she had moved on to other things, as do most graffiti artists and their documenters. As Karl Kempton’s step daughter, she had grown up amid torrents of visual poetry and was probably as much influenced by what she saw at home as by anything else. Though she didn’t join the project directly, Amy put Karl in touch with several photographers among graffiti artists, and photos from them made up the basis for the site, along with an essay on graffiti that I had rewritten over and over for a decade. The site went on-line on a carefully calculated date: May Day 1998. May Day is the central holiday of the Anarchist calendar, reaching past its Soviet parodies to the traditional celebration of the coming of spring - something for all people, something that the local duke or mill owner or senator or commissar can’t take away from you, and no legal mechanism or police action or ideological con can prevent from happening. I had hoped that this site could act as a place for dialogue between visual poets and graffiti artists. As a visual poet, it seemed best to open the discussion with comments on graffiti or on visual poetry by graffiti artists. So far, none that I have contacted has accepted the invitation. As much as I’d like to see exchange between the two groups, perhaps the graffiti artists know what’s best for them. They certainly know better than I how to handle the Web, and the Web has provided them with an ideal means of working their way through the barriers of their local ghettos to communication with people practicing their art throughout the world. Graffiti artists keep sketchbooks. Those of the masters become something like sacred books, and young aspirants take pride when a master writes something in their books. These are people who have kept book magic alive and vibrant in their communities, though most people who claim to be book artists don’t see them through the veils of prejudice around them. Taking advantage of the tools and environments available is the essence of their art. Environments act as stimuli for ideas that help shape the art. A set of three doors on a loading dock, for instance, provides a natural triptych that graffiti artists can use as a structural principle, just as they learn to work rhythmic patterns through the panels of buses and use the fixtures and contours of buildings as focal points in their designs. When the Web became available, they were quick to pick up on its possibilities. Like me, they could extend their books and provide venues for work that otherwise would have to remain local. At any given time, there are literally thousands of graffiti art sites on the Web. Among the many advantages of their on-line efforts, this allows graffiti artists spread around the world to contact each other, to compare their work, and to get new ideas from each other. It gives people in rural and suburban areas the opportunity to see what graffiti artists do in the urban environments where the art usually thrives. Graffiti art on the Web includes its share of paradoxes and serendipities. Graffiti art tends to draw more on television than on print models. Transposing tv characteristics to paint on walls of buildings and the sides of trains has enriched the street art considerably. When they move their art to the Web, they are back in a realm similar to television, and the radiant light of television that has done so much to stimulate their work on surfaces seen by reflected light returns to a back-lit medium. Many graffiti artists find free hosts at sites such as Geocities which include pop-up advertising. This brings them back to something like the environment of the street, where the artists also work around and through signs, billboards, and other forms of advertising. On the street, graffiti art works through transience. When the work goes up, it usually gets removed quickly by “graffiti busters” supported by property owners and the police. This too has acted as a stimulus for the artists, who tend to work in series or by what art historians call “programs.” As soon as one work gets effaced, another goes up in its place, and many graffiti artists take full advantage of the sequencing of images this creates. Some graffiti Web sites can document and extend the life of these sequences. Other sites become as transient as graffiti painted on subway cars: its there for a few days, then it’s gone. This reflects not only the ephemeral nature of much graffiti, but also the view of the ephemerality of life and experience among graffiti artists. For them, the world is constantly in motion, flickering like the images on television. My graffiti site includes links to several hundred other sites for the art. Many of the sites linked have only a fleeting existence, and I can’t keep up with the changes in the field, even though some site holders try to keep me informed on what they’re doing. Graffiti writing includes some significant negatives and I have written about them elsewhere. Only one seems important in the present Web context. Using the web as a distribution system allows many graffiti artists to imitate each other rather than build on the work of their peers. This may exert a homogenizing effect on the art. Although this is unfortunate, the reader should note that the same thing occurs in any successful genre. Pick any movement in the arts you’d like, and you’ll find that imitations spring up and sometimes dull or choke original work. Late 20th Century graffiti art at times makes interesting though oblique comments on and additions to other art forms and social issues. Several women whose judgment I respect have found my interest in graffiti art sexist. They claim that this is a macho and misogynist art practiced by males as a form of sexual bragging. You can indeed find some of that in graffiti art. But the demographics of the art prove otherwise. As far as I can determine from sources better informed than I, including a number of women, at least 35% of graffiti artists are female. Perhaps some feel the need to show that they’re as tough as the boys, or act as minor members of the crews that produce large scale work. That’s as it may be. But as far as I can tell, more women than men move on from graffiti art to commercial art and other art forms. It’s possible that this macho art provides more benefits for female practitioners than do their male counterparts. In addition, the racial demographics of the art know no prejudice, despite the fact that racists sometimes produce graffiti. In the U.S., the number of black and Latino graffiti artists make up larger portions of the practitioners than their demographic ratios do in the country at large. Attempts at determining the race or ethnicity of graffiti artists on the web remain elusive, since this is an art in which everybody picks up on ideas from populations other than their own. The Situationist outgrowth of Lettrism sought a society and an urban environment that would create “situations” - that is, opportunities for artistic and social exchange that could not be predicted beforehand but would arise spontaneously in an integrated and egalitarian society free from capitalist and authoritarian restraints. For a brief time in 1968 it looked as though something like this indeed had taken over the streets of Paris and other cities in France. To the surprise of activists and reactionaries around the world, the movement included support from organized labor and other people among the working class. Over ten million workers staged the largest wildcat strike in history. This groundswell ran through the streets of France under slogans generally called graffiti. Today, you can find plenty of latter day Situationists around, and the easiest way to find them if you’re unfamiliar with the movement is on the Web. Ken Knabb runs an admirable, huge, sagaciously edited, and eclectic Situationist site. Jean Heriot runs a model low-budget, populist post-Situ manifestation. Many of the old guard Situationists continue an extremely bizarre and arcane form of discourse that doesn’t extend beyond their group. Perhaps the part of the legacy and the most inclusive form of Situationism now realizes itself not among people who’ve heard of Situationism, but younger people who both create and take advantage of situations through the streets of the world. And perhaps the dreams of 1968 come closest to fulfillment among contemporary graffiti artists. Whatever the case, my small graffiti site gets thousands of hits a month, sometimes second in number only to the main directory. Clearly, graffiti artists know how to make maximum use of the electronic street opened by the World Wide Web. My hope is that some of them check out other entries at Light and Dust, and that some of the literati check out the graffiti artists. |